From Entertainment Weekly 1995
A Genuine X-Centric
The truth is really out there for UFO-busting G-man David Duchovny
David Duchovny admits he does have some things in common with Fox "Spooky"
Mulder, the stone-faced, alien-seeking FBI agent he plays on Fox's cult hit
The X-Files. "We look alike," Duchovny says from the show's Vancouver
set. "We're not completely different. That'd be too much of a strain to do
10 months out of the year. To have to act all the time would kill
you."
Okay, so both guys have a deadpan sense of humor. (Mulder's wit has been
emerging this season; when a vampire asked him if he wanted to live forever,
Mulder replied dryly, "Not if drawstring pants come back into style.") Duchovny
says he also shares Mulder's curiosity and, "most importantly, nothing shocks
either one of us. I think I get that from growing up in Manhattan."
One other thing: Neither dude's a dummy. Duchovny, 34, left New York City
to attend Princeton, then proceeded to Yale, where he worked on a doctoral
degree in English. Does he ever miss academia? "Only at 3:30 in the afternoon
when the sun is getting a little lower and it would be nice to take a nap
with a book. Or a coed."
Though X-philes love to speculate about it, Mulder won't be bedding
down with his partner, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), according to Duchovny.
"The characters' bond is just as good as sleeping together. If we progress
into a [sexual] relationship, that becomes the focus of the show," he says.
"And then it becomes like any other show which focuses on a boring relationship
between two white people."
Not that Mulder's celibate. He recently got lucky with a bloodsucker played
by Perrey Reeves, Duchovny's real-life girlfriend. That's a switch from his
other current role, as the lone-wolf narrator of Showtime's soft-core anthology
Red Shoe Diaries. "Everybody else gets the girl on that show," he
says. "I'm always alone with my dog."
Dogs are something of a recurring motif in Duchovny's career. He played a
yuppie villain in 1992's Beethoven. "He had a lot of saliva," Duchovny
says of his canine costar. "Saint Bernard saliva is sticky and nasty. If
you can imagine bad-smelling maple sap, that's what it's like to work with
that dog."
